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Microsoft have finally unveiled part of what they're planning for the next version of Windows

It looks interesting if I was using a tablet, but I can't help thinking that to make proper use of it will need apps specifically made for that interface and interoperability with other desktop/tablet apps, and I'm not sure quite how many Win8 apps there will be. Given the main reason I am on windows is the legacy of many apps (and games) made for the WIMP UI, and that if I was moving to using a tablet I'd make a clean break for something made for and fully committed to the task. However, as a bridge between two worlds, it seems quite nice.

Apple has tighter control over its hardware, and OS X doesn't go into as deep a sleep as Windows does.

Usually, Windows hibernates when you close the lid, which basically takes all of RAM, dumps it to disk, and then shuts the computer down. When you open the lid, the computer reboots completely from scratch. Windows realizes it's resuming from a hibernate, loads RAM up from the file on disk, and then resumes where it left off. This is faster, usually, than a full boot, and brings you right back where you left off, but it's not terribly fast.

OS X goes into a 'suspend', low power state, where it continues to maintain energy to the RAM, and just barely tickles the processor once in awhile to check to see if the lid's open yet. So it slowly bleeds away power, where a true hibernation doesn't. But it's pretty efficient, and on my MBP, I only lose about 10% a day of charge, which I think is a pretty good tradeoff for an instant start. When the lid is opened, the system just picks up exactly where it left off, everything being all pre-loaded.

It does seem to do a scan for new hardware on restart, and some devices get re-initialized (like the wireless), but it's usually fast enough that by the time you actually need those resources, they're ready.

Windows has a standby mode, which works a lot like Apple's, but usually it's much more energy-consumptive; on a couple of laptops I've had, the power consumption is more like 10% per hour instead of per day. I think that's because Microsoft doesn't control the hardware, and most manufacturers don't maintain the combination of hardware and software expertise needed to make their standby modes work really well.

Oh, and no, I don't think it's Windows versus Unix. In most respects, Windows actually uses its hardware better than OS X does. But power management is in the 'finger pointing' area, where manufacturers think Microsoft should be doing it, and Microsoft thinks the manufacturers should be doing it.

I'm sure I read in one of the OSX Lion articles that on standby (or whatever mode) it takes a screenshot of running applications to use as placeholders until they're ready to go again.

That would explain the little interval during which the display is on but the computer doesn't respond to input, then. So it's a psychological trick to make the waking-up process seem even faster than it actually is.

Having installed the Win8 Dev Preview on my E6400 I can tell you Windows sleeps and resumes VERY fast.
The bootup time is also great.

Time to sleep is about 3-4 seconds.
Time to wake is less than 4 seconds.
This is a non UEFI bios on a low end corsair SSD, total cold boot time is 14 seconds including logon
(I estimate 5 seconds of that is Dell bios and intel disk controller.)

My only worries about the interface of Windows 8 is that it seems to have two versions of major applications that seems more severe the full-screen mode vs windowed mode in Mac OSX Lion. I haven't jumped into the deep end of how things work, so I have absolutely no idea what that requires from a developer.

My only worries about the interface of Windows 8 is that it seems to have two versions of major applications that seems more severe the full-screen mode vs windowed mode in Mac OSX Lion. I haven't jumped into the deep end of how things work, so I have absolutely no idea what that requires from a developer.

I haven't played with W8 yet, but that's something I would be worried about, or at least sounds non-optimal. Having said that, the current ways windows apps work is often non-optimal so what's yet another way of doing things.

One thing I do like the sound of is 'contracts' that I read on Anandtech, which is essentially an application offering to do something with a certain type of content, so programs can link together better.

For desktop use, non-metro (if that's possible), it'll just be another revision of windows. It does seem like if they're serious about metro being used by PCs of all shapes, sizes and input methods, then they need to find a better way to meet in the middle that isn't "pretend your mouse is a finger". Forcing something awkward onto people, even if it's just for an initial period to get over a learning curve, is so often met with resistance and people just want to disable it to get things done.

It's like PC <--> console ports, it's not that you can't move from one platform to the other, but that it needs to suit that platform and all the characteristics of that platform.

I suspect due to the interface changes in Win 8, a lot of enterprises might not upgrade for the sake of user training costs. They may skip it like they did Vista.

Training is usually the least of the concerns; licencing and breaches are the usual suspects. Companies who are serious about the safety of their information will wait for the initial security holes to be breached and patched. Once security firms are able to assess how Win8 compares to previous iterations, companies will take a look and see if there's any benefit.

My company has about 14,000 PCs and all still run WinXP. All our network security, drivers, configurations have been optimized for WinXP. Doing everything all over again for Windows 8 is just not worth it.

My company has about 14,000 PCs and all still run WinXP. All our network security, drivers, configurations have been optimized for WinXP. Doing everything all over again for Windows 8 is just not worth it.

That sounds like a fun balancing act between the cost of security and the cost of migrating when XP is end of life. Presumably at some point they'll have to move (unless it's on a nice isolated locked down network), so it's a case of choose your poison which version you want to go for. I'd like to think MS would allow you to kill all the metro stuff, just as they've made basic 'starter editions'.

I suspect due to the interface changes in Win 8, a lot of enterprises might not upgrade for the sake of user training costs. They may skip it like they did Vista.

Training is usually the least of the concerns; licencing and breaches are the usual suspects. Companies who are serious about the safety of their information will wait for the initial security holes to be breached and patched. Once security firms are able to assess how Win8 compares to previous iterations, companies will take a look and see if there's any benefit.

My company has about 14,000 PCs and all still run WinXP. All our network security, drivers, configurations have been optimized for WinXP. Doing everything all over again for Windows 8 is just not worth it.

My company has 30-40K PCs, and we do think very seriously about training transitions. We're on XP looking at going to Win 7. The interface changes to 8 would require significantly more dollars to be spent in training. We also consider all the rest of the stuff you mentioned, but training to Windows 8 doesn't look trivial with our work force.

But we have a lot of people who have lower computer skills, although that's not the problem it was 10 years ago.

So anyways, since I'm actually at the build conference (and got the free tablet ) let me chime in on what I've learned in the sessions and additional info I've come across.

The metro interface is purely for tablets and consumers. All versions with a quick left side send you back to a traditional windows 7 style desktop.

Touch is in no way, shape, or form intended to be the interface used for data entry heavy/business apps/office, etc. They are embracing touch for media, sharing, browsing, and other common consumer tasks.

Everything that today runs on win 7 will continue to run just the same in win 8.

My Developer preview came loaded with some little games similar to the 99 cent titles you can get from the itunes store. Seems Microsoft (rightfully) wants a piece of that pie. Every other bullet point at the conference is encouraging developers to start apps for the store (since they're pretty far behind apple at this point in time).

The "windows 8 apps will be html 5 and javascript" FUD was exposed as FUD. They still plan on supporting XAML, Silverlight, WPF, and the entire .NET stack. .NET is getting some signficant upgrades and focus in the areas of parallel processing and socks communications. They have exposed some pretty rich hooks into the rendering engine of windows, and have made it easy for developers of all types to get hardware accelerated transitions, etc. There is very deep direct x integration and exposure through the new APIs, which should make life a lot easier.

Visual studio and blend are getting a lot of new features for pre-wiring the metro style interfaces (for consistency) and a lot of hooks for sharing between applications (highlight in IE, send to twitter app, email, whatever consumes that interface). This type of contract style hooking will allow a lot of your apps to interact without developers having to write any plumbing which should be very nice (though I worry about too many apps showing up as choices there).

Visual Studio and Blend are being leveraged with a lot of c++ features, direct x features, and basically should now be able to handle being first class game development engines (again, for the app store I'm guessing).

Microsoft is generally pretty good at providing good tools for developers, they're really going after the app store and the easier casual experience (metro). Hardcore/power users can stay in the windows 7 style desktop and be happy. Seems they're trying to satisfy both camps, not sure how it will work out but I'm encouraged. The free tablet will replace my ipad if the app store can ramp up like the itunes store did.

Before I dive in, would I be severely disadvantaged by running this on virtualbox (more than usual), or is it much much better to run this on a proper install? I'm not going to be running this as day-to-day OS or anything.

Any word on 360 games running on Windows 8? I think I read that rumor a while back.

I think it was more about this than running 360 games directly in Windows 8. That never made a lot of sense to me, as you'd have to do emulation or VM due to the different types of processors, which would have some pretty serious hardware requirements I'd think.

Any word on 360 games running on Windows 8? I think I read that rumor a while back.

As far as I can see, there's nothing in this preview to do with games beyond what's already in a base install of Win7. No GFWL, no XLive folders, no cunningly named .dlls, still on DX11.

MannishBoy wrote:

I think it was more about this than running 360 games directly in Windows 8. That never made a lot of sense to me, as you'd have to do emulation or VM due to the different types of processors, which would have some pretty serious hardware requirements I'd think.

Yes, they would have two options. Somehow make 360 games run natively, or emulation. Seeing as emulation of the decade old PS2 is still slow and often glitchy I don't see it happening for the 360 any time soon. Whether the NextBox is different is anyone's guess.

I hope it's possible. I would be pumped if Windows 8 could run the Xbox UI and XBLA games. Running 360 games and being able to add AA/AF would be a plus though.

The 360 UI is already on course for going metro.

MannishBoy wrote:

XBLA would be interesting, but I don't think native code would work. They just need to be compiled to run in Windows.

I think the main problem isn't just compiling it (taking into account the differences to actually get it to compile), but the optimisations. Consoles being a known target, one set of hardware and optimised to a known level on that hardware, and PC where anything goes, but it should work on standards (but in reality the developers still need to do a load of specific tweaks). A console game might know it will only run at 30fps, but if you make the same assumption on a system that might not keep up, well, I've seen console-PC ports that use the framerate as timing, so the variation in run speed (and it wasn't a very good port, so the framerate was up and down all the time) caused time to change rate too.

Agreed on the licensing though. I'm also thinking of the measures needed for the Xbox backwards compatibility, it's not automatic.

Yeah, I simplified it a bit. You're right it's more than just getting it to run. But I think it's probably not nearly as difficult if they're developed on Windows hardware using a lot of the libraries MS makes available.

DirectX and XNA developed games should be considerably easier than, say, porting a PS3 exclusive I'd think.